This is Jonah Goodhart’s favorite quote and the source for the namesake for his fledgling enterprise analytics company he co-founded with his brother Noah and Chairman Mike Walrath. MOAT is dedicated to helping companies better understand how to create engaging digital advertising experiences to build their brands. To Jonah brands are “moats” that both create emotional bonds with customers and serve as the key point of differentiation between companies’ products and services, protecting the company from the horde of businesses seeking to breach the walls of their company with undifferentiated products and services sold at commodity prices. Both Warren Buffett and Jonah refer to the Coke brand as an example (Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns a large investment position in Coca-Cola). Coke is a brand that stands for “refreshment”, not the carbonated sugar water that describe its component elements.

It’s a lofty goal for such a thoughtful and soft-spoken person, especially given the fact that advertising on the Web is dominated by direct response advertisers chasing the most efficient way to buy transactional-based ad impressions focused on either cost per click-through rates or customer acquisitions. “I want to bring back the aura and feeling brand’s create through advertising that’s been missing on the Web,” says Goodhart.

MOAT is a SaaS analytics company focused on transforming brand advertising online, in establishing industry-leading metrics and benchmarks for measuring advertising and content engagement and effectiveness beyond traditional measures such as clicks and social shares. “We created MOAT to fix what we saw was a broken advertising model. Two-thirds of all offline advertising dollars are focused on building brands. In digital, it’s the reverse,” stated Goodhart. “Advertisers will need to figure out how to build brand desire in the digital realm as well, as consumers are spending an increasing majority of their time consuming digital media.”

Jonah’s brand evangelism is somewhat ironic given his part in building businesses that helped create the $14 billion U.S. digital display direct response industry in the first place. Jonah and his brother are successful serial entrepreneurs who made their mark and fortune creating and selling transactional-based digital marketing businesses. Most notably, Jonah, Noah and Mike partnered to launch Right Media in 2002. Right Media, which was run by Mike who was the CEO, went on to develop one of the first ad exchanges and real-time bidding businesses, the Right Media Exchange. That company was bought for $850 million by Yahoo! In 2007. The business helped advertisers efficiently buy ad impressions at-scale across the long-tail of the web and its oceans filled with trillions of seemingly undifferentiated ad banners.

Growing up in a middle class household in Michigan, entrepreneurial success came early to the hard working Goodhart brothers. Jonah’s eldest sibling, Josh started a newspaper while he was at Cornell and later a magazine called Jezebel that he later sold to the founders of , the country's second largest operator of radio stations. It gave Jonah his first look at business and was a big influence on him and his brother Noah. Jonah also went to Cornell (as did all three brothers—all on financial aid Jonah adds) in 1998 when the dotcom ecommerce boom was in full bloom. He was fascinated by all the special and free deals from the likes of PayPal, Pets.com and Barnes & Noble and started aggregating the deals and along with his brother Noah, starting emailing them to their friends. One of the companies noticed what they were doing and began offering them a small bounty for any referrals their lists provided. All they had to do was append a tracking code to their emails. Thus was born one of the first successful digital affiliate marketing programs.

“It was a pretty exciting moment. I went from earning $5 an hour at the Computer Center to seeing $1,000 to $2,000 show up in my account over night. It was addicting,” says Goodhart. The brothers' email aggregation business morphed into a customer acquisition marketing services company and an email publishing business. Jonah and Noah met Mike Walrath during that time. Mike was a sales person at what was then Doubleclick’s ad network business and Jonah was buying ad impressions to drive his company's growth.

"We figured out with Mike that if we could make display advertising work at scale, we could build our business very fast," says Jonah. They started with a $5,000 test that ran over the weekend yielding $10,000 in revenue. The next week they spent $20,000 with the same result and so on. Eventually they were buying $25 million in ad impressions. In three years, the business grew to $70 million in revenues, all while Jonah was still in college. Then the dotcom bubble burst and Doubleclick sold its ad network business to Max Worldwide. Mike decided to leave to start a new ad business and partnered with Jonah and Noah. The brothers' gave Mike start-up capital and began buying from the new company. “Mike came up the name ‘Right Media’ for the new business and it stuck,” says Goodhart.

With the sale of the business to Yahoo!, Jonah, Noah, and Mike became active Angel investors and started a $25 million fund (WGI) which invested in 65 different companies. At this point, Jonah and his partners began seeing that the problem with digital marketing was that it was too focused on demand fulfillment and not enough on demand creation and began their quest to build a technology company that would provide brand marketers with the digital advertising analytics and intelligence that matter most to them. MOAT was self funded as a start-up by Jonah, Noah and Mike with an initial $3 million. Legendary billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and his fund Founders Fund came along with the "godfather of angel investing" Ron Conway, and other well known angels, and invested $1.5M in a friends and family round. An additional $13M was added in a Series B led by Mayfield Fund and Softbank.

What will success look like for MOAT in the future? Jonah, ever modest and humble for such a two-time winning entrepreneur, puts his aspirations in his platform adoption terms rather than financial success. “Success means that marketers won’t be able to conduct effective digital advertising to build brands without MOAT,” say Jonah. He seems to be well on his way to accomplishing that goal.